K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

A preliminary attempt: Crux 2.7 i586

My free time has been brief in the past few weeks, but I’ve managed to give the Crux ISO for i586 a turn or two.

The initial Crux 2.7 release included a strong suggestion to avoid upgrading, but I don’t recall now if that meant using the upgrade option on the ISO, or simply pointing the ports files at the 2.7 repository and upgrading manually.

For me this was the first time I had actively tried an upgrade as opposed to a clean installation. I got into that habit with Ubuntu, and for me that’s still the best way.

This time I used the 133Mhz Pentium, which is droning away with kernel 2.6.35.1, downloading torrents and living out its days as an in-house network host.

I have the added complication of needing to yank the drive any time I do any real work with it, so in my case I used a flashed image of the drive, mounted it from an emulated machine, followed the upgrade option on the 2.7 ISO, and crossed my fingers when I replanted it in the host.

Results were mixed. Most of the software seemed to install correctly, and I didn’t run into any of the issues that were mentioned with the 2.7 release note.

But oddly, the host machine — the X60s running Arch Linux — can’t recognize the correct size of the drive (120Gb), and keeps spitting out disk errors because the machine is reporting impossible locations on the drive.

The true host though, the Pentium, doesn’t care (how’s that for ironic?). So I end up wrangling with the drive anyway to get the results I want.

As a consequence I have a feeling things don’t really take in the way I wanted them too. And this is the “easy” machine really — the 120Mhz machine with no USB drive and no CDROM … now that’s going to be a challenge — so I don’t mind rebuilding from scratch.

Lesson learned … is … I don’t know. I have a feeling with a traditional system (in other words, one that didn’t require technical acrobatics to get the system working) the ISO upgrade option would be okay.

But things are never that easy at my house. And usually I only have myself to blame for that. 🙂